The team was tasked with identifying the causes of wiring defects occurring at the winding phase of production at Westover Wire Works. They analyzed defect data from September and identified specific issues for each of the three winding machines. They also created a new layout and process flow with additional inspection points to improve quality control. Their recommendations included collecting more comprehensive data over three months, addressing machine-specific problems independently, and implementing their proposed changes to layout and inspections.

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Case Study Number 2
The Westover Wire Works
EM 451 | OM 451 | Section 1
Due Date: November 3, 2016 - 9:00
The Dream Team (’92 Bulls)
Zach Peck
Clint Hobbs
Jared Carson

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Introduction
As a new hire at WestoverWire Works, we were extremely excited when our manager Maria Espana
assigned us work on the first day. The operations manager at WestoverWire Works was experiencing an issue
caused by an increasing number of rejected products found during the manufacturing phase.We were giv en specific
defect data for the month of September in which 100 products were tested across three different winding machines.
Tom Morrow was nice enough to provide us with this data, which was turned into a check sheet seen in Figure 11
Fortunately, we have some experience in quality management and we were confident enough to tackle this issue. We
broke the issue down into separate objectives in an effort to better understand and troubleshoot the process.The
objectives were as follows: identify the causes ofthe wiring defects,address possible solutions, and solve other
potential issues that affect the overall quality control in the plant along the way. Simply stated,there are defects in
the finished product,which have been occurring at the winding phase of manufacturing, for the past 2 months. There
have been roughly 311 total defects for the month of September which can be seen in the data given to us by Tom
Morrow as well as in our check sheet (Figure 11). Our team is attempting to point WestoverWire Works in the right
direction of where to begin fixing this defect problem.
Executive Summary
Our first recommendation is to acquire more in-depth data. Currently the WestoverQuality team does not
have metrics on which employees were working on each machine, as well as what the route of each batch of WIPs
or finished goods.This may be a problem solved with a tracking mechanism, such as RFID or barcode. The data that
Tom, the quality manager, gave to the management trainee is sparse and should be expanded upon to make an
informed recommendation. Data that would be helpful would be the supplier name, and maintenance schedules of
the winding machines. Additional data would be most helpful in the form of the 7 basic quality tools,such as in
Pareto Charts (Figures 1-4), Check Sheets (Figure 11), cause and effect diagrams, and flow charts (Figure 10).
The quality team currently only conducts one inspection during the entire process from receiving and
packaging, but we strongly recommend that there should be more inspection points in order to catch the errors
before the end of the winding phase which can be seen in our flow chart (Figure 10) and our redesigned plant layout
(Figure 8). Based on the current layout and the standard process of“drawing, extrusion, winding, inspection,and
packaging” (Pg. 1, Case 2), It is impractical to cross the routes and to leave the workstations closed off. Please refer
to Figure 10 to view the old layout. We recommend the new floor plan (Figure 8) as it is arranged linearly to

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maximize efficiency; new inspection points have been added in as well which we recommend to help collect better
date, decrease mistakes, time, and long term costs.
We would also recommend to pull data from the past three months as opposed to only September. Tom
Morrow initially said, “...Rejects in the Winding Department have been killing us the past two month” (Pg. 2, Case
2). Rather than only make a recommendation from one month’s data set,we would request the winding rejection
data for July-September. This complete data set would address the two months Tom talked about and show us what
would be considered an acceptable threshold before the wiring defects grew in size.
Body
The first step in our process was to understand the floor layout along with the process flow of materials
throughout the plant. After just one short walk through the plant, we noticed that the layout was far from as efficient
as it could have been. The old layout can be seen in Figure 9, which was set up so that materials were moving across
the floor of the plant and then backtracking across the plant for the next step in the process.The original flow of
materials was stated to be: “drawing, extrusion, winding, inspection, and packaging. After inspection, good product
is packaged and sent to finished product storage; defective product is stored separately until it can be reworked”
(WestoverWire, pg. 1). To solve this issue,we are proposing a new floor layout (Figure 8). While designing the
new floor layout, the first step we took was to understand the process flow of materials (Figure 10). We found there
was not enough inspections along the way which we believe could lead to the defects of wrong wires and wrong
cores being used at Machine 2 and 3 (Figure 2 and 3) In the new plant layout (Figure 8) one can see that we have
used a horse shoe design which will better improve the ability of employees and product to be moved around the
warehouse. The new design also has the manufacturing stations laid out in the correct order so materials do not have
to crisscross and zigzag around the floor from step to step.The overall goal of this is to eliminate the confusion and
potential error of using the wrong parts, while also minimizing traveling distance.
Please refer to figure 10 for a visual interpretation of the following paragraph. To ensure total quality,
WestoverWire Works should be inspecting the raw materials received immediately after receiving them. If the
inspection fails, we know right away that there will be errors in the finished product and therefore we can send the
raw materials back to the supplier. From there, the subsequent steps should be as follows: drawing, extrusion,
winding, and then another inspection.This second inspection is important because we will be able to troubleshoot
the errors caused from the winding process and therefore conclude if there is a defect in one of our machines. If the

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second inspection is passed,we will move the finished product to packaging & finished goods.If the inspection is
failed, the product will be sent to rejected storage,reworked, and then put through the final inspection again. This
improved process with multiple inspections along the way will improve quality control, allow better data collection,
and save WestoverWire Works a lot of money in the long run. These data collection/inspection points are vital steps
where we can take down data in the form of a check sheet as seen in figure 11.
Our second step was to dive deeper into the specifics of the original problem. Tom Morrow noted that the
problem was with an increase in rejected products and supplied us with data on these defects (WestoverWire, pg. 2,
4). We took this data and made a Pareto chart to show the frequency distribution of defects for all machines and a
check sheet (Figure 4 and 11). We noted that 311 defects in September was absolutely cause for alarm, but also the
large amount of defects in bad winds, abraded wires, wrong wires, broken leads, wrong cores, and twisted wire is an
even larger cause for alarm (Figure 4 and 11). The check sheet (Figure 11) also showed some suspicious days where
exactly 11 defects occurred which are highlighted in yellow. On the first Monday of every week there is roughly
four abraded wire defects, highlighted in orange. The data highlighted in blue represents that there are very
consistent two to three day patterns for the twisted wire defect as well.
Our next step was to create a Pareto chart for each individual machine with our thought process aimed to
check which defects were caused by each machine. If the defects were similar, then the errors are potentially
stemming from a problem other than the machines, or all three machines became defected at the same point in time
(highly unlikely). In our analysis of Machine 1, we found that there were 66 broken leads, 55 bad winds, and an
acceptable amount of defects in the remaining parts surveyed (Figure 1). The Pareto chart for Machine 2 showed the
following: 25 wrong cores, 20 abraded wires, and again a small amount of errors among the remaining pieces
(Figure 2). In examining Machine 3 we found 78 twisted wires, 38 wrong wires, and a plausible amount of other
errors that were considered negligible (Figure 3). It was interesting that each machine had different errors in such
abundance.We were anticipating to find similar errors throughout the three machines due to them undergoing the
same process with materials from the same supplier. Scatter plots were then created to find out if maybe these
defects were correlated, for example; maybe a broken lead will in turn lead to a bad wind. We created scatterplots on
the top two defects of each machine to test their correlation as shown in Figures 5, 6, and 7. These graphs represent
no correlation among these defects across all three machines - therefore we recommend that the problems within the
machines should be dealt with independently.

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Conclusion
As a team we worked quickly and effectively to understand that the winding machines would be a primary
issue,but we took longer to arrive at the conclusion that there are secondary issues.Aftercareful read-throughs of
the Case 2, we discovered insignificant verbiage between Tom and the management trainee to discoverthat the data
collection suggested by Tomwas ignored in favor of less data points.We recommend to pull the data for three
months, to include the month prior to winding machine issues.We also would recommend that this data be more
thorough and include some of the 7 basic quality tools such as a check sheet and some pareto charts (Figure 11 and
Figures 1-4). Along with using these tools, the data should include things like who the supplier of the materials was,
what worker was using each winding machine and when, where the workers received the parts they were winding,
what workers were in charge of inspection,moving materials, and storing materials, and upkeep/maintenance
schedules of the winding machines. The floor plans provided by Westover(Figure 9) did not allow for proper
supervision or quality control over movement of material. In order to better understand ournew layout design,we
included Figure 10, a flow chart to visually guide management through the new process of material flow. We used
this flow chart to design a new layout and we also increased the number of inspections stations within the wire value
stream to introduce more control over the standard process (Figure 8).
References
1) Martinez, C. (2016, November 2). Case Study2: The WestoverWire Works. Retrieved October 21, 2016,
From https://moodle.clarkson.edu/pluginfile.php/468774/mod_turnitintooltwo/intro/Case%202.pdf

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Appendices
(Figure 1)
(Figure 2)

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(Figure 3)
(Figure 4)

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(Figure 5)
(Figure 6)
(Figure7)

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New Layout (Figure 8)
Old Layout (Figure 9)

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Flow Chart (Figure 10)
Check Sheet (Figure 11)